Clothing Startup Everlane Opens A Pop-Up Store In New York, Now Has 400000 ...TechCrunchClothing startup Everlane has opened a pop-up store in New York for the holidays.

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

Everlane is rockig retailing at its core. By treating its customers as "members", using technology to suppot WOW customer service and controlingth means of production Everlane is creating a fun experience and loyal customers.

I admire them for going black on Black Friday. They put a simple page with white type on black statign why they were opting out of Black Friday madness. Well done and probably generated millions in free PR.

1. Don't think in terms of success and failure, win and lose. Think about impact, learning, and potential. Startups require a more nuanced sense of win/lose.

2. Don't hire your friends even if they are the right people because you are probably blind to faults, issues, or other "round peg in square hole" problems with friends.

3. Create any startup in collaboration with customers. Don't do the "mad inventor" thing and go off and think you've created a better mousetrap. You won't. Instead, collaborate and build on what you learn from real customers facing immediate problems.

This Fortune post is encouraging and informative. Encouraging because fewer startups fail than urban myth predicts and informative because insights shared about learning the rules of the road are accurate to our startups experience.

If you think creating a startup is unstructured and free you'd be wrong, very wrong. Startups have an intricate ballet of rules, gatekeepers, and customs. Ignore any of those things at your startup's absolute peril.

I don't think my startup failed due to impolite attention to rules and regulations. We failed because we didn't have the right people sitting in the right seats on the bus. Friends and business partners can be one and the same, but hiring friends creates more work not less.

When hiring friends you need to guard against your assumptions and playing rough can be harder with friends. Playing rough is needed because every startup is a life or death struggle against time, competition and the evolution of markets. This post shares all of that and more. A good read for any wannabe startup entrepreneur.

Meshing Explained In 3 MinutesWe decided to let the experts speak directly to key concepts of our Five Planning Disruption Tips for SMBs by editing TED Talk videos into 3 minutes of concentrated detail on a speaker such as Lisa Gansky. Gansky covers "startup thinking" via her book The Mesh and our topic Meshing Mashups.

Banksy Marketing TipsThe elusive English artist Banksy is nothing if not a master marketer. He has much to teach online marketers too. This Curagami post discusses four Banksy marketing tips including:

We've started with core Racery functionality. Lots of potential upgrades envisioned to support virtual running challenges or cycling races.

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

Henry Copeland's RaceryMy friend Henry Copeland is one of the smartest digital marketers I know. His company "blog ads" was thinking sideways while the rest of us weren't thinking at all.

Henry just launched his latest startup - Racery. Wish Racery was around when I created Martin's Ride To Cure Cancer since I would have used Racery instead of spending $40,000 to ride 3,300 miles and make $40,000 for cancer research.

Sure there was a great adventure in Martin's Ride and all the money we raised went to help cure cancer, but that means I came home BROKE and TIRED (lol). With Racery I could have created a race and stayed home.

Congratulations to Henry for being accepted into the Apple store. That is a big deal and Racery is another hit from one of the smartest entrepreneurs I know.

Medium's Read Time App and Scoop.it's Lean ContentThis Curagami post shares KUDOS for Guillaume Decugis and the @scoopit team. Medium's making their read time app, somethg they call Readism, available across the web is sure to hasten every prediction Guilluame and company made about lean content marketing several years ago.

Medium's new "app" is a Chrome extension. If you are creating content and NOT using it you're nuts. We decided to make two posts instead of one when we saw six minute read time on our lean content + tools riff.

But their side did say "many more", so we will save our 1,000 word six minute read content curation tools post for tomorrow. In the meantime, if you're not using Medium's read time app Readism and you use content to market online you're nuts.

"Despite rapid innovations in data processing and machine learning, many businesses have yet to make the leap from the Industrial Age to the information age, and the gap between technological and organizational progress is widening. Closing this gap requires much more than short-term fixes, like adopting new technologies. Businesses need to organize around long-term strategies for growth and partnership in a sustainable way. The consequences for not doing so can be dire.

Eastman Kodak is the textbook case for failing to prioritize an innovation agenda; business schools around the world study the ramifications of the company’s ill-fated decision to ignore the digital photography market until it was too late. It’s far from the only case of a failure to embrace a more digital approach; the larger shift to digital is changing the way every industry operates. Some industries, like photography and media, were impacted earlier. Others, like financial services, are only now experiencing this change in earnest. The common thread in each instance is that a failure to recognize signals and prioritize innovation over short-term profits before it’s too late can have existential ramifications and cause negative ripples throughout broader capital markets."

If That doesn't scare the pants off you then we don't know what will. Money and finance are under pressure and it's innovating or die time. Money, as we've known it, is already dead man walking.

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

HBR article shares many places startups are and will be changing finance and money.

Haunting, miserable and heartbreaking failure is nothing anyone every thinks will happen to them. Yet, failure is a necessary step says this Inc process post every startup should read.

Inc's focus is on how bad ideas impact design, but truths shared, far from self-evident, are good to learn. Bad things become good things by recognition and listening. Bad design becomes a good design by tweaking, testing, and more listening.

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

Haunting miserable failure is a necessary condition of good design. For every charmed life capable of creating winning design from the jump there are thousands that must fail first. The "Charmed" are clearly exceptions to the rule as this Inc post shares.

IOT As DisruptionMarketing attribution has been a mess for years and, as this Forbes post shares, it is about to get worse thanks to the Internet of Things (IOT). Not hard to see why either.

More than just a gizillion URLs running around headless and in the middle of an e-commerce merchant's funnel potentially hurts, biut the everyone looks at everything differently thing is a killer. Any marketer who has changed, even slightly, their product listings knows how hard patching old and new data together can become. Now imagine that data quilt when metrics from different paths are encrypted differently.

Going to be a FORTUNE to be made in knitting all this junk together and filtering out the noise. Startups are you listening?

Snapchat SpectaclesThis Curagami post shares links to 10 recent posts about Snapchat's introduction of their picture taking glasses called Spectacles. From the Ray-Bans design to the vending machine introduction Snapchat is creating some of the best "new marketing" we've seen.

The post shares more on how Snapchat is wiping the stain left after Google Glass away with fun, great marketing and design. Lots of lessons to learn here including don't even try to do everything. Create movements and ask for help instead.

Why Do Mean Fear Asking For HelpMy friend and Curagami co-founder Phil Buckley wrote Fear, Shame and Asking for Help several years ago. Today "Why Do Men Fear Asking For Help" came us as our #1 searched term. That question's top search position made us ink up our quill and write another post about why men fear asking for help.

It's a longish piece so I'll bottom line it here. Men are condition to NOT ask for help. But there's a problem. Tomorrow's culture, technology, and business will evolve and change faster than anyone can keep up. That means if you don't ask for help you will be crushed.

Or, on the positive side, those who learn to ask for help will achieve Darwinian victory. Their beaks will do the trick. If you want to know what the heck that last sentence was talking about you'll need to read my Curagami post: http://www.curagami.com/men-fear-asking-for-help/

What about you? Why do you think men have such a hard time asking for help? Share here or email martin(at)Curagami.com and I'll add your thoughts into the post.

Branding In A RevolutionHow can we market or create markets in the middle of a marketing revolution? The usual suspects are going, going and gone. Can't buy TV and print ads and expect to build a brand these days.

Marketers recognize they are spending their money in all the wrong places, but habits die hard. This Curagami post shares a favorite David Edelman Harvard Business Review article and mashes David's conclusions with Bynder's new Branding Report.

Want to know how to brand in a digital age? We share a few of our favorite branding sources, tips and how tos:

I think Joi Ito's TED talk about NOWISM is correct and a tsunami trend few understand or address. Right after the NOWISM wave comes the, "We are all software creators" wave.

We love this line, "It is decidedly non-trivial for a company in a non-tech traditional industry to start thinking and acting like a software company." Damn skippy it is hard to become a "softwareist".

Software engineers speak a different language, think differently than left brain creatives (most marketing people are left brain creatives) and want to engineer the world.

The subtext of this well written and intelligently conceived post is find blue oceans or die. I'm mixing metaphors since the post doesn't contextualize using Kim's great Blue Ocean Strategies book, but the implication hangs in this post like a line separating winners from losers.

An article that reminds us that software is everywhere and that all companies should focus on making this trend part of their strategic plan.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

The article focusses on 2 key elements: timing and focus. These are essential as not all industry move at the same speed. Case in point: book sales and grocery. Probably two ends of the spectrum, book sales have moved to online early and in a big way. Grocery: not so much. Actually, not yet. Because we all know it is coming, we will buy our staple grocery cans from a website in the coming years. Question is when.

And when this happens, when customers are ready and retailers find a way to remain profitable even when they do more work, then it will become a game of choosing the right products at the right price. Same as today. But with a different distribution channel. Focus will remain being a great grocer, not a great technology company. Or will it?

Netflix Misses and Guides Down - Marty NoteWall Street was throwing the Netflix baby out with the bathwater today as if TODAY means anything. Clue - today means very little. That's why we wanted to share 5 reasons why the future has Netflix written all over it:

Streaming is the future

Netflix Content

TV & Web = Merging

TV & Social Nets = Merging

80M+ Istalled User Base

Netflix's content is getter better and will continue to do so. Good content becomes a self fullfilling prophecy. As the TV, the web and social networks merge Netflix is sitting right in the middle of a crowded street holding a GO / NO GO sign.

If Netflix has a weakenss it is the closed loop nature of their social content. Much like Apple, Netflix only shares content with "members" cutting off a powerful and cheap way to attract new members.

Unlike Apple Netflix may begin to open the can some. When Netflix crowdsourced their reviewer rating algorithm with $1M prize they nodded to the true nature of their product line - the INFORMATION they know about us (memers and viewers).

If Netflix is an information play why they would take an Angie's list approach to their social content is a mystery. Netflix's willingness to crowdsource indicates they are open to throwing some doors open. Netflix as streaming platform will pale to Netflix the social, shopping and collaboration platform - think Facebook for your smart TV - and who better to create such a patform than the much miligned Netflix.

If the future was about TODAY then sellers and shorts are right, but the future is almost NEVER about today and the substantail digital assets and ideas Netflix has created, is creating and will create bode well for the company, their stock and our viewing and entertainment pleasure.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.